What I Was Review

What I Was review: an obsession shaped by tide, memory, and projection

This What I Was review reads Meg Rosoff's 2007 novel as a story about the dangerous wish to exchange one's life for somebody else's. An unnamed narrator, speaking at the age of one hundred, returns to 1962 and his unhappy sixteenth year at St Oswald's, a failing boys' boarding school on the Suffolk coast. There he discovers Finn, a self-sufficient teenager living alone in a fisherman's hut that the tide can cut off from land. Finn seems to embody everything the narrator lacks: competence, beauty, freedom, and an identity untouched by institutional rules.

The attraction is inseparable from projection. The narrator does not merely want Finn's friendship. He wants the coherence he imagines Finn possesses. Rosoff makes that desire intimate and unsettling, then uses illness, secrecy, and a late shift in understanding to expose how little one person may know about another. Readers exploring young adult fiction should expect a quiet, psychologically charged novel rather than a plot-heavy school adventure.

The thesis is bracing: adolescence can turn admiration into self-erasure, and memory can preserve the intensity of that mistake long after it has learned to describe it.

The century-old narrator makes memory part of the mystery

The first-person voice comes from an extraordinary distance. The narrator is not recounting recent events with youthful immediacy; he is a centenarian whose mind keeps returning to a single coastal year. This frame gives the story the authority of survival but not the certainty of a record. What he remembers has been polished by decades of longing, embarrassment, and interpretation.

That distance creates two versions of him. The sixteen-year-old resents school, disappoints his father, and drifts through rules with defensive mediocrity. The older speaker can see the comedy of that posture, yet remains emotionally captive to Finn. Irony does not cure the obsession. It makes it legible.

Rosoff uses this split to prevent a simple celebration of escape. The older voice knows the hut was cold, exposed, and precarious. He also knows how powerfully it represented another life. Memory holds both truths without reconciling them.

St Oswald's turns education into confinement

St Oswald's is not merely an unpleasant backdrop. Its routines, architecture, and hierarchies embody the identity the narrator rejects. The school wants to produce a recognizable English man through discipline, endurance, and conformity. He responds with passivity rather than rebellion, protecting himself by caring as little as possible.

Finn's hut reverses every feature of school. It is small but chosen, isolated but free, vulnerable but self-sustaining. At St Oswald's, food and time arrive according to rules; at the hut, survival depends on weather, tides, and labor. The narrator mistakes this contrast for proof that Finn escaped society.

The contrast carries class implications. A boarding-school boy can romanticize deprivation because he can return. Finn's precarity is not an aesthetic experiment. Rosoff does not make this a lecture, but it complicates envy and makes the visits less innocent than the narrator knows.

Finn is person and imagined ideal

Finn's appeal rests on reticence. Because Finn explains little, the narrator fills silence with desire. He reads self-containment as mastery and solitude as purity. Every practical act rebukes his dependence. The less he knows, the more complete the fantasy becomes.

Yet Finn is never only a symbol. Vulnerability enters through bodily need, especially when illness makes isolation dangerous. The hut cannot protect its occupant from every emergency, and the narrator's world cannot remain outside forever. Care is where idealization meets responsibility.

The later revelation about Finn is often called a twist, but its deeper function is to expose the narrator's seeing. Readers reconsider how identity was inferred, which details were ignored, and why the fantasy required Finn to occupy a role. Rosoff shows confidence built from assumption.

The coast gives emotion a geography

Fog, cold, mud, and shifting access create a landscape where boundaries cannot be trusted. A route open at one hour may be submerged at the next. That rhythm makes secret journeys plausible while giving them symbolic weight.

The tide resists permanent escape. Finn's hut appears separate from school and family, but is never wholly detached. Water isolates it temporarily, then recedes. The narrator can cross between lives, but cannot freeze either one.

Rosoff's setting is sensuous without becoming decorative. Weather affects bodies, schedules, and risk. Readers drawn to literal transformation can browse fantasy; What I Was asks what happens when a person tries to imagine transformation into being.

Strengths: compression, unease, and retrospective irony

Rosoff writes with compression. A scene can carry school satire, attraction, class discomfort, and danger without announcing each layer. The novel trusts readers to notice contradictions between speech and behavior.

The sustained unease is another strength. Even peaceful visits feel temporary because tide, authorities, weather, and illness intervene. Secrecy makes the relationship precious but prevents safety. Intimacy depends on concealment, which raises the cost of help.

The retrospective voice gives the ending resonance. The narrator has lived extraordinarily long, yet one adolescent relationship remains a measure of identity. That persistence can feel romantic, selfish, or tragic; the novel refuses to settle it.

Cautions: a difficult narrator and destabilizing reveal

The narrator's self-absorption may frustrate. He treats classmates and adults with contempt, uses Finn as an answer to dissatisfaction, and mistakes intensity for understanding. Sympathy does not require endorsement.

The revelation demands care. Some readers may feel it turns identity into surprise. Others see a critique of assumption. The distinction depends partly on whether Finn remains visible as a person after the narrator's structure collapses.

This is not a conventional romance, nor does it say neatly what the relationship “really” was. Readers needing explicit mutuality may find the restraint withholding. Those open to ambiguity will find the gaps central.

Reader fit and alternatives

What I Was suits readers who enjoy unreliable narrators, coastal atmosphere, and coming-of-age stories where desire exposes class and identity. It also works for adults interested in how old age edits adolescence.

For a young protagonist using investigation to impose order, Half Moon Investigations is more comic and plot-driven. Perfect Girl offers a contemporary study of social performance. Rosoff's novel remains colder and more elusive.

Masculinity is one of the identities under examination

St Oswald's offers the narrator a rigid model of becoming a man: endure discomfort, obey hierarchy, hide need, and convert education into status. His failure to thrive there is not simply laziness. It is also resistance without an alternative vocabulary. Finn appears to supply that alternative through practical competence and apparent independence.

The attraction therefore crosses several boundaries at once. The narrator admires a body, a way of living, and a freedom from institutional masculinity. He cannot easily separate romantic desire from the wish to be the person he desires. Rosoff uses that confusion rather than resolving it into a label.

The older narrator's voice complicates matters further. A century of hindsight gives him language for irony but not complete mastery over the past. His account shows how identity can be reorganized around one encounter even when later life contains far more experience.

This is why the book's reveal should not be treated only as a puzzle answer. It tests which assumptions about gender, sexuality, and self-sufficiency the narrator—and perhaps the reader—brought to Finn. The most productive response is not to congratulate oneself for guessing, but to ask what desire made visible and what it refused to see.

Final assessment

What I Was is compelling because it never grants the transformation the narrator imagines. Finn's life cannot be borrowed, the hut cannot remain outside time, and memory cannot make partial knowledge complete. The coast turns those limits into weather and tide.

Rosoff asks readers to distinguish love from projection without pretending they are easily separated. The narrator is perceptive enough to describe his vanity and still unable to escape its emotional claim. That contradiction gives the book its disquieting force.